Destroying the V weapons

 last night  we watched a movie about the photo interpreters (or PI as they were commonly called) and the roll the played in World War Two. The PIs were a top secret group of Royal Air Force officers who spent their day studying pictures taken by Spitfire spy planes behind German lines. They were trained to look for anything that might be part of the German war effort such as hidden factories, airfields, warships, supply dumps, fortifications, and any thin that seemed unusual  or out of place. They were equipped with for the time High Tec machines such as the stereoscope which allowed them to see in 3D, and the Wild(pronounced vilt) Machine which allowed them to accurately measure height, width or length critical information when cartographers  built models of the targets for pilots to study.

     One day in the spring of 1942 a Spitfire pilot flying a photo reconnaissance mission over the town of Peenemunde on the cost of the Baltic Sea saw something quit odd. On the ground were three large circles of concrete surrounded by out buildings. What were they for? No one knew for certain but it was believed by some that it was nothing more than a sewage facility so the photo was numbered, filed and soon forgotten.

     Later that summer the British secretly recorded a conversation between two German generals that they had captured in North Africa in 1941. In the conversation one general mentioned that something must be wrong with the German Rocket program because he had not heard any of the explosions of the rockets when the crash into their targets.

      At once the British ordered more aerial reconnaissance photos to see if The Germans really were building rockets to fire at England. The PIs studied these new Photos and many of the old ones to find any evidence of the rocket program. One of these photos was the one the spitfire took over Peenemunde several months before. Close examination revealed that on the center of each circle was a small tube. These tubes turned out to be V-2 Rockets.  Also in the picture they dicoverd a small airplane shaped object siting on a ramp this turned out to be the V-1 buzz bomb also Known as the Doodle Bug. The Allies immediately launched operation Crossbow to destroy the V-1/ V-2 launch sites. Thanks to Allied air power the sites were destroyed  though some rockets were launched and possibly shortened the war by as much as 2 years.

The V-1 Buzz Bomb or Doodle Bug

 

 

The V-2 High altitude rocket .

Watch the NOVA video 3Dspies of World War Two

 

Post by Bear. Both photos by Wikipedia